this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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Not all tools are worthy of the way they are being used. Would you use a hammer that had a 15% chance of smashing you in the face when you swung it at a nail? That's the problem a lot of us see with LLMs.
No, but I do use hammers despite the risks.
Because I'm aware of the risks and so I use hammers safely, despite the occasional bruised thumb.
You missed my point. The hammers you're using aren't 'wrong', i.e. smacking you in the face 15% of the time.
Said another way, if other tools were as unreliable as ChatGPT, nobody would use them.
You've missed my point.
ChatGPT can be wrong but it can't hurt you unless you assume it's always right
And assuming it's always right is what the general public is doing.
Like the lady who drives into the lake because sat nav told her to.
That lady, presumably, is one lady.
But imagine, for a moment, if satnavs had directed hundreds of thousands of people into this lake or that. Don't you think that would be a problem? Like, we put glass guards around whirring saws for a reason.
Yeah, I'm all for proper regulations on these things. Definitely a lack of guard rails.
My point was more about the reactions and rhetoric that emerged around that lady, but you make a good point too
Hammers are unreliable.
You can hit your thumb if you use the tool wrong, and it can break, doing damage, if e.g. it is not stored properly. When you use a hammer, you accept these risks, and can choose to take steps to mitigate them by storing it properly, taking care when using it and checking it's not loose before using it.
In the same regard, if you use LLMs for what they're good at, and verify their outputs, they can be useful tools.
"LLMs pointless because I can write a shopping list myself" is like saying "hammers are pointless because I can just use this plank instead". Sure, you can do that, but there's other scenarios where a hammer would be kinda handy.
This is the part the general public is not prepared for, and why the whole house of cards falls apart.
I agree - but that's user error, not a bad tool